Connect With Xelis
Forum > https://xelis.io/
Discord > https://discord.gg/xelis
Telegram > https://t.me/xelis_io
Twitter > https://twitter.com/xelis_project
Connect With CryptoLowCap Team
Rowenta01 > https://x.com/CryptoRowenta01
The_Dowser > https://x.com/The_Dowser42
Q1 – CryptoLowcap Team
Welcome Slixe! We’re delighted to welcome you today to explore the fascinating world of Xelis. To begin, tell us a little about yourself: what’s your background, and what inspired you to embark on this adventure?
A1 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Hey there, I’m just a regular guy who has been in crypto since 2015 now, and followed a few projects. I have been passionate about programming because it was giving me the opportunity to create my own things. I started as a CPU miner, then GPUs. Which I totally stopped in 2020. I was following another project from 2018 until last year (2023), but I was curious to create my own project, with my own vision as I was few times in disagreement with choices made by that previous project about design choices. First, my blockchain was just like a Proof-of-Concept project to learn and improve my skills also, but I got quickly joined by other people seeing a great opportunity in it to make something fresh.
Q2 – CryptoLowcap Team
How does Xelis’ value proposition bring unique innovation to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and what distinctive advantages does it offer over existing projects?
A2 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Well, we want to make everything simple, and try to create our own path, where we can be really easy to use, while providing a better scalability and privacy level than Bitcoin / Ethereum.
I would say, the distinct advantages we have are, we’ve built everything from scratch, no fork of a known coin, which reflect our determination of doing something new. But also, enabling Homomorphic Encryption on a Layer 1 chain while being compatible with a BlockDAG in an account model.
Of course we’re actively working on providing a Smart Contracts feature on the XELIS network with a unique difference in how tokens work: nobody can freeze them once they are in your wallet, and it’s your wallet who manages/stores them, not a smart contract.
Q3 – CryptoLowcap Team
How many developers are currently working on the project, and how are you organized? Can you tell us about your role within Xelis, the talents of your team, and what motivates you on a daily basis?
A3 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
We are currently 3 active developers in the team. Each of us is assigned a product/domain as our primary activity. Ez3kiel for example is exclusively on Genesix Wallet, it’s him who does the whole design / development of it, with help from time to time of G45 & myself. G45 is assigned to all the frontend work (explorer, stats, status, faucet and so on). Other developers (HectoFR & Pieswap) in the team are only solicited when we’re in a rush or for specific tasks.
We also have Yar, who is our designer and made us all the models needed for each product.
This is the team that started XELIS, and we got joined quickly by other new people like Cyber, TheAllFather, N1ko13 as multi-tasks moderators, mostly in charge of communication / partnerships.
My role at XELIS is to keep pushing back our limits and keep everyone motivated.
I’m also more like the “lead developer” even if everyone is in full autonomy and works on what they like to do.
We just want to build something out of nothing, prove that we can achieve it, and seeing that the community is growing everyday helps us a lot. Seeing each minor step that we do as an accomplishment.
Q4 – CryptoLowcap Team
Xelis seems to have a strong community approach. How do you see the project’s governance evolving over the long term, particularly in terms of decision-making and future development? Can you detail how the Xelis community will be involved in the governance and management of development funds, particularly after the integration of smart contracts?
A4 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
I hope we see more and more developers being interested in XELIS and start building on it or even contributing. We start to see this with a few people on the Smart Contracts that are trying to help.
We had some ideas of building a DAO to transfer the responsibilities of the development funds to it, so people can directly be involved on how it can be spent/used. This is only an idea for the moment, but I would like everyone to be able to give their own voice. Or to simply just disable the dev-fee program by reducing it to 0% after N years to be completely free.
Q5 – CryptoLowcap Team
The project was launched without premine (fair launch), and the team finances itself through 10% of block rewards. Can you explain the reasons behind this decision and how it aligns with Xelis’ vision?
A5 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Yes, I don’t like the idea of premine anymore since I discovered the dev-fee system used by ZCash, I feel it is the best way to be auto-sufficient and give more “trust” to community because I see premine as a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone: it could fall at any moment. While with a dev-fee, it is following the blockchain emission and we don’t own more than dev fee % configured. Which gives us time to prove our intentions, to build a good relation with the community and to also to keep working on the long-term for the success of XELIS.
Q6 – CryptoLowcap Team
The cryptocurrency market is extremely harsh between each bull cycle, launch timing and tokenomics play a key role in ensuring a project’s visibility. Do you think Xelis’ launch and business structure are well suited to the current market cycle?
A6 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
I don’t really look at this, I’m just having fun building and coding everyday on XELIS, that’s my passion. I can’t comment on the market and even if I could, it would be terribly wrong for me as I have a bias. The only reason we’ve launched in march is because I felt the core was ready, and that I’ve wanted to slowly build a community around the project to attract enough developers once the Smart Contracts go live. Because I’m afraid that if we don’t have enough community developers interested in XELIS, the project would be unused like 99% of other crypto projects.
Q7 – CryptoLowcap Team
Xelis uses an innovative hashing algorithm combining ChaCha8 and Blake3, offering security, performance and resistance to ASICs and FPGAs, demonstrating your commitment to technical excellence. Is this opposition to ASICs or a temporary position for the early years of blockchain? How does this technical decision fit in with Xelis’ long-term vision, and how do you plan to adapt this approach in the face of future technological developments?
A7 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
My main arguments for the ASIC resistance is, CPU and GPU can be bought by anyone, anywhere, and almost everyone now owns one of them. A low-barrier to join and secure the network through the PoW consensus which means a better decentralization.
Nothing wrong with ASICs, but this is also creating metal waste as once they are outdated, you can’t do anything with them anymore. CPUs and GPUs have a lot of other use-cases even after several years, for example my RX 570 that was used for several years in one of my mining rigs, it’s still alive and working well in my computer.
I also don’t like the arguments of “better efficiency” because efficiency doesn’t mean much for me, the more a network is popular the more it will use energy, even if you are mined by CPU, GPU, FPGA or ASICs. Yes you’re gonna have a much better efficiency against other devices, but your ASICs will just consume more to produce even more hashrate.
I really like what CryptoNight was provided back in the days, that any CPU or GPU could mine together on the same algorithm, and that’s what I’m trying to provide again, because it’s thanks to Monero that I started to be interested in mining, I want to give a chance to every new comers to feel that, being part of a big, decentralized, autonomous network.
Q8 – CryptoLowcap Team
How precisely does the « Smooth Difficulty Adjustment » (Which I understand is based on the Kalman filter) mechanism work to stabilize mining difficulty transitions, and what specific benefits does it bring in terms of network security and predictability?
A8 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
A good example is when we have some miners whales doing “waves” on the network hashrate. On moving average difficulty algorithms, they could mine at a low difficulty and go away once it stabilized to the real network hashrate, which would let others miners on the network to mine at a higher difficulty, slowing down the blocks rate, and rewards of others miners (because of a higher difficulty, the block time would be longer than the expected one).
The advantage of using Kalman filter lies in its ability to rapidly converge on the actual network hashrate while effectively filtering out misleading fluctuations caused by temporary hashrate spikes.
So as an example, if tomorrow we lose 90% of the network hashrate, the next block would be really difficult to mine and could take up to hours instead of the 15s configured. One the new block is mined with the remaining network hashrate, the network difficulty would be drastically adjusted to be accurate again, preventing being stuck on a really high difficulty for several blocks, which could kill a whole chain.
Q9 – CryptoLowcap Team
Given that Xelis uses ElGamal-based homomorphic encryption (Twisted ElGamal) for transaction confidentiality and plans to implement smart contracts via XELIS-VM, how do you plan to reconcile these two technologies? More specifically, what strategies have you planned to enable smart contracts to interact with homomorphically encrypted data, while maintaining confidentiality and optimizing network performance?
A9 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Only the balances and transaction amounts between users are encrypted. ZK-Proofs helps to validate that a ciphertext (encrypted data format) is valid against conditions (not above the balance of the user for example). Also, transaction fees are plaintext, and just like block rewards, they are added to the miner’s balance. Because ElGamal allows to do operations between plaintext and ciphertexts.
Smart Contracts can easily send coins to a user. This also helps for auditability, we know exactly what’s going on with smart contracts.
If a user needs to deposit coins to a Smart Contracts, it will have to do a “plaintext deposit”, where the coins are visible by anyone.
Think about Ethereum, but with the privacy on user balances and their wallet-to-wallet transactions only.
Q10 – CryptoLowcap Team
How does Xelis and the protocol as a whole plan to manage scalability and network performance over the long term, particularly with regard to managing the size of the blockchain and transaction processing speed, given the use of BlockDAG and the integration of technologies such as Homomorphic Encryption and Zero-Knowwledge Proofs?
A10 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
To increase the scalability and network performances, we need to reduce by even more the time it takes to verify and execute each transaction or a block based on the current DAG order. Currently we are really good and we don’t have much traffic yet, but this could be a problem when we will start to handle more than Ethereum traffic. This will need more research.
Our transactions are lightweight & our blocks too, they are fast to be propagated and verified. For the blockchain size, after 5 months we are only at around 6 GB on disk with over 285 000 transactions (small reminder that each TX can have up to 255 transfers).
To reduce the disk usage, we provide a pruning feature allowing a node to remove from the storage all previous blocks / transactions which is really helpful, and we can have light nodes by combining it using fast-sync mode (which will sync only the top chain, not the history). To reduce even further the size of a pruned chain, we can delete older versions of balances / nonces that can’t be used anymore.
Q11 – CryptoLowcap Team
Given Xelis’ ambitious goals for privacy, smart contracts and scalability, how is the project addressing the blockchain trilemma? In other words, what technical innovations or compromises is Xelis implementing to balance decentralization, security and scalability, while maintaining its key functionnalities such as transaction and balance confidentiality?
A11 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
For the decentralization and security part:
- I bet on GPUs and CPUs to decentralize the network as much as possible. For me, they are the biggest mining community, the more we have people on the network, the better it is.
- Simplicity to run a node and being compatible with any devices due to low specs requirements. (currently, 800 MB of RAM, 10 GB disk space and you’re fine).
Scalability:
- BlockDAG, as we saw during the network upgrade in July, we were up to 12 blocks per second until the difficulty is adjusted again.
- ZK Proofs are aggregated and verified in batch, which allow us to be as low as 0.40ms per TX by a batch of 100 TXs in best conditions.
- BlockDAG generation / verification take up to few milliseconds only.
- PoW verification take only 1ms on average per block.
The fastest a block is verified, the better it is for network scalability.
Q12 – CryptoLowcap Team
What plans does Xelis have to encourage adoption by developers and facilitate integration into various applications? Assuming that Dapps come to be developed on the protocol, what incentives do you foresee, and is an ecosystem fund envisaged to support this?
A12 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
This is still to be determined, but the dev-fee will be a great advantage here as we can organize build competitions, sponsor some dApps and even more! We listen to our community, and try to act as they want.
But the main success point for us is giving tools for developers to easily build new things.
Q13 – CryptoLowcap Team
Can you tell us more about the timetable for rolling out smart contracts? What are the major objectives for 2025, and what will be the next key milestones for Xelis’s development beyond this point?
A13 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Currently, there is no deadline for Smart Contracts and we try to not give any to prevent the pressure from the community and people around for the short term. We want to build something good enough, and not ship something unfinished just to add a checkmark next to it into the roadmap. We need to build something safe and reliable, otherwise Smart Contracts would just add a ton of vector attacks on the network and we would see the same issues as others (chain stopped as example). We of course don’t want this.
Involved community members can see the development on Discord where we are daily active to see all the advancements we’re doing. But once the Smart Contracts are finally released, the main focus will be to build the DeFi and to keep improving the VM and the chain speed.
Q14 – CryptoLowcap Team
Now that the project’s technical foundations are well established, what are your marketing and communications strategies for boosting Xelis’ visibility and supporting its development? The design and graphic charter are particularly successful and provide a real visual coherence. How do you plan to capitalize on this identity to attract even more users and developers?
A14 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
I’m maybe going to finally accept some voice interview, or go to conferences to meet people. But on the project side, we have Cyber which is working on partnerships, and marketing while keeping the community active & aware of how the project is going.
Q15 – CryptoLowcap Team
With many blockchain projects facing regulatory challenges, how does Xelis plan to reconcile its commitment to user privacy with increasing compliance requirements?
What specific strategies or mechanisms does the team have in place or plan to implement to maintain the integrity of its vision while navigating the evolving regulatory landscape?
A15 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Our plan is to be an alternative and to educate people while fighting for their privacy. A blockchain keeps a trace of everything that is happening on the chain, of every transaction, if people want to do illegal things better to use fiat than something that is analyzed / tracked by everything and stored forever.
I had an idea of generating some sort of proof verifiable at a specific lock topo height to prove that you own N coins which could be useful for temporary viwable access to a wallet.
Q16 – CryptoLowcap Team
Of all the projects in the crypto ecosystem, which ones inspire or excite you the most, and why? Is there a new project you’d like to highlight, or an holder one you’d like to salute for its contribution to the sector?
A16 – Slixe, Xelis Lead Developer
Bitcoin, for creating all this, because without it, maybe nothing similar would exist? Maybe we wouldn’t even speak or I wouldn’t even meet several great people. It’s indirectly putting people in relation around the same idea. It’s the grandpa of all.
Starknet, more particularly the Cairo VM, I really like their idea even if I didn’t take the time to look deeply in it.
Monero as they are fighting for the full privacy right. (and because it’s one of the few that I started with!).
Kaspa because they are working hard for their scalability, and their community is really active.
And the older one that I want to salute: DERO, because it’s the one I was exclusively following and participating in from 2018 until 2023.
CLOSING WORDS
Xelis is shaping up to be a promising project driven by technology enthusiasts. We look forward to following your progress and seeing the protocol adopted on a large scale. Thank you, Slixe, for your time, and we wish you all the success you deserve for the future! Rowenta01 & The_Dowser!
Connect With Xelis
Forum > https://xelis.io/
Discord > https://discord.gg/xelis
Telegram > https://t.me/xelis_io
Twitter > https://twitter.com/xelis_project
Connect With CryptoLowCap Team
Rowenta01 > https://x.com/CryptoRowenta01
The_Dowser > https://x.com/The_Dowser42
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